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Compare Forum Application Alternatives

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Purpose: To research potential forum application alternatives and list pros and cons.
Alternatives
- Status Quo - Asgaros Forums
- SMF (Simple Machines Forum)
- Simple:Press
- wpForo
- BBPress
- Phpbb
- Xenforo
- Vbulletin
SMF
- Open source application (free).
- Simple Machines Forum (SMF) Reviews
- Does not integrate with Wordpress or PMPro (membership management)
Simple:Press
- Wordpress plugins indicates 600+ active installations (!)
- There are no current Youtube videos newer than 13-14 years ago.
- Their support forums are very sparse and appear to be supported by a single person (Joakim).
BBPress
- Developed, owned, and maintained by Automaticc, the company that created and owns Wordpress.
- Integrates well with Wordpress and PMPro
- BBPress themes - “...these themes will affect how your ENTIRE WordPress site looks instead of just the forum pages. This includes your home page, your blog pages and more. If you’re ok with that, though, this is one advantage of bbPress.” Source
- “Out of the box, bbPress is pretty limited in community-building functionality. Other than a basic profile page (below), there’s not much of a community feel in the core”
- “In the core plugin, your only moderation options are to perform actions from the front-end”
- Requires many different plugins to customize the appearance and functionality. I found it so flexible I couldn’t decide how to best configure the display or what features to include. After looking at many websites they all look so different it was difficult to decide what to do.
Source: https://cms2cms.com/blog/phpbb-to-bbpress-migration-or-vice-versa/
wpForo
- Wordpress plugins indicates 30,000+ active installations
- Youtube (14:52): wpForo (WordPress Forum Plugin) - Customization Options
- Best WordPress Forum Plugin | wpForo Review & Tutorial
- How to Set Up a Stunning Forum in WordPress with wpForo
- What is the best Forum plug in for Wordpress, WPForo vs BBpress or other suggestions?
- Can it use AWS S3 image URLs for images in posts? Yes, using the plugin.
- Does it use MySQL database? Yes
- Go2wpForo migration tool - has a migration option for Asgaros that preserves user passwords.
- More advanced feature set than BBPress.
- Enhanced features cost money - bundle costs $190 per year.
phpbb
- Open source application (free)
- Full-featured, evolved, well-supported, popular
- Does not integrate with Wordpress or PMPro
- Free-standing application. It has its own code base and database, not connected to Wordpress at all. There are pros and cons to this.
- While it is a competent forum application, it would require a separate, third-party bridge for existing users to authenticate and log into the phpbb forum application. Otherwise, everyone would have to create all new accounts and they would not be linked to previous posts. The bridge software then becomes a critical link in the future. This is doable but not ideal.
- I actually created and have run a forum for 16 years using phpbb so I am very familiar with it (www.romeoriders.com). But the forum evolved from the beginning as a standalone application so it doesn't need to integrate with Wordpress. Our entire existing user base is within the Wordpress user database so this would be a challenge.
Xenforo
- Enterprise scale - Starts at $60/month
- BMW MOA recently moved from Vbulletin to Xenforo (2024).
Vbulletin
- Enterprise scale - way too expensive.
Other References and Resources
- Best WordPress Forum Plugin: Simple:Press vs. wpForo vs Asgaros Forum
- gConverter forum-to-forum migrations - https://gconverters.com/forum-to-forum-migration/
- The Admin Zone forums: Best Forum To integrate with WordPress?
Jerry
I fly (and ride) to free my mind from the tyranny of petty things. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Posted : April 11, 2024 8:05 pm
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